The cost of binge drinking - more junk from Bath University

... The team from University of Bath's Institute for Policy Research and the University of Essex ... said to offset these costs, policy recommendations such as including a 52 pence minimum unit price for alcohol and an increase in alcohol excise duty directly in line with alcohol strength should be considered. This is based on a working paper (which went online six weeks ago) that makes estimates of how much binge-drinking costs the NHS and police service. These calculations have been made before, notably by the Cabinet Office in 2003. The Cabinet Office's research had its flaws, but the Bath University methodology is really shaky. For example, it derives the cost to the UK's Accident and Emergency departments by extrapolating from an estimate of the cost to one Primary Care Trust in Solihull.

Anti-Depressant-Driven, Suicidal, Homicidal, Lobotomized States

Last week, I started out thinking that the Germanwings air crash had most likely been caused by a sudden depressurization of the plane. But since the cockpit voice recorder was found, it’s emerged that the co-pilot locked himself in the … Continue reading →

BBC: 'Success' Is 25% Of An Industry Collapsing

Life at Puddlecote Inc is extremely busy at the moment and likely to be for some time, so content may be sparse here for a while.

In the meantime, you may be interested in a 10 minute piece on the Irish smoking ban from the BBC World Service which you can listen to here. You see, the BBC has told the world that Ireland's ban was a great success because they found a former opponent whose pub is still in business. So that's all right then.

He's one of the lucky ones, though, because there were 9,964 licensed pubs in Ireland 2004 when the ban arrived, but only 7,509 - and falling - eight years later in 2012 according to the FT. Or, as one publican described it ...

It’s easy to see ‘nanny state’ issues as some of the less pressing threats to freedom today. Partly this is the result of the term nanny state itself, which sounds rather cuddly but is misleading because nannies generally have the interests of their clients at heart—something that can’t always be said about the modern public health movement. And partly it is because the public health lobby is often regarded as an arm of the medical community and people generally respect and trust doctors. This is also a misconception. The public health has very little to do with health and more to do with statism, snobbery and anti-capitalism.

It’s Happened Again

The clocks went forward an hour today in the UK. Or maybe they went back an hour. I’ve already forgotten which. Chris Snowdon has written a rather humorous piece about British Summer Time, and the objections raised against it, including … Continue reading →

Glorious Daylight Saving Time

As any fool knows, the world is run by people who get up early in the morning [citation needed] so it is surprising that Daylight Saving Time has lasted as long as it has. It is 99 years old in the UK but there are still those who object it, including farmers, Scottish highlanders and Peter Hitchens. The latter recently described this "mad annual ritual" as "lying about the time".

They will say that it is 9.00 a.m. when it is in fact 8.00.

Churches, shops cafes, railways, buses, TV stations and everyone else will join in the mass deception. You can stand aside if you like, but unless your life is totally private, you will (at the very least) inconvenience yourself.

Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey

In a time when democracy doesn’t seem to work any more, and politicians seem to be under the control of the EU or the UN or anybody but the people who elected them, it might be worth considering the end … Continue reading →

Hunter-gatherer Moralists with Cell Phones

More on lunatic “health” experts from James Delingpole: There was a letter to the Daily Telegraph last weekend which depressed me more than anything I’ve read in ages. It reported the visit by a social worker to an elderly woman … Continue reading →

More evidence on alcohol advertising

No matter how much evidence shows that advertising affects brand choice rather than total consumption, the public health racket will continue to say the exact opposite.

For example, Gerard Hastings recently appeared before a House of Lords committee to talk about alcohol regulation. Whilst there, he told this brazen whopper...

"All the evidence is that if marketing is encouraging you to consume a particular brand, it is also going to have an impact on category." "All the evidence" does not say that. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of the evidence shows that advertising for any established category, includingalcohol, has little or no effect on overall consumption.

Creeping Fascism

Well, that didn’t take long. Last night I wrote: The next revelation might well be that she’s actually the real public health minister, and Jane Ellison is just one of her stooges. H/T Taking Liberties, Deborah Arnott has gone one better … Continue reading →

You WILL Drink In The Pub, Godammit!

The Irish licensed trade has come up with an ingenious business plan ... it's cosying up to government drink-haters to welcome consumers back to the pub by force.In a move clearly targeted at the big supermarket chains, where cans of lager are routinely offered for below €1 each in bulk deals, the group called for a floor price of €1 “or more” to be introduced on every 10 grams of alcohol in a product. That would put the minimum retail price of a 500ml can of beer with a 5% alcohol concentration at €2.So, Ireland already boasts (if that's the word) the most expensive alcohol in the EU apart from Finland, but these guys want to see the Irish public screwed even harder to nobble their competition?

Healthy high streets

The medical establishment's bid for world domination continued today, with the Royal Society for Public Health (whoever they are) demanding the right to decide which shops are allowed to open and where they should be allowed to position their goods. In the same way as Lord Darzi has a fascist desire to turn public parks into 'Beacons of Health', this mob wants to live out their Albert Speer fantasies in our town centres.

California Department of Public Health E-Cigarette Web Site is Full of Lies; Why Can't They Just Tell the Truth?

I never thought I would say this, but in March 2015, public health officials are telling more lies to the public about the health effects of smoking than the tobacco industry.

I took the time to review the web site that the California Department of Public Health put together about electronic cigarettes and tobacco cigarettes and was appalled to find that the site is full of lies.

Here they are (these are not direct quotes but assertions that are clearly insinuated):

Who Is Misinforming Jane Ellison About E-Cigs?

Today, anti-smoking group Fresh North East issued a press release which expressed worries about how e-cigs are being portrayed.In 1976 Prof Michael Russell wrote that 'smokers smoke for the nicotine but die from the tar. When we urge people to stop smoking, we explicitly mean to quit smoking tobacco. It is a worry that concern among smokers over the perceived dangers of electronic cigarettes and vapourisers appears to be rising compared to the much more harmful product which is tobacco. A significant number of people hold incorrect beliefs about the harm from electronic cigarettes and nicotine - believing that part or most of the health risks from smoking are from nicotine.Unusually for a tobacco control industry press release, this is actually true. Nicotine has been described by the RCP as a "very safe drug", by NICE as "relatively harmless", and Waldum et al concluded that "our study does not indicate any harmful effect of nicotine when given in its pure form by inhalation". So who is spreading all this alarm about nicotine?

California Department of Public Health Running Campaign to Keep Smokers from Switching to Electronic Cigarettes

I was absolutely shocked when I viewed the new print ad campaign coming from the California Department of Public Health, which Stan Glantz had touted as being outstanding. The campaign could not be any more advantageous for the combustible cigarette industry than if cigarette manufacturers had designed the campaign themselves. But to top off this sad story, the cigarette companies are not spewing forth the same false and misleading propaganda, even though it would benefit their cigarette sales. Instead, it is the California state health department that is doing the industry's bidding. This is a startling and sad retreat from the days when California was truly a leader in tobacco control.

Mascot Watch #31: ASH In The Trough Edition

There have been many stories in the press about MPs getting their noses in the trough, but this is one about a Lib Dem MP using his influence to get someone else's nose into a very lucrative trough indeed.

Paul Burstow is a particularly oleaginous, one-track minded anti-smoker who is Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Smoking and Health. This group is secretaried by ASH and acts as the political arm of their lobbying operation.

Where are John Dalli's supporters now?

Silvio Zammit is currently on trial in Malta as a part of the John Dalli corruption scandal. It's not easy to summarise such a long-running saga briefly, but these are the basic facts:

John Dalli, a Maltese politician, was the EU Health Commissioner until he was sacked by Manuel Barroso, then the president of the European Commission, in October 2012.A close friend of Dalli named Silvio Zammit was caught on tape trying to solicit a €60m bribe from the snus company Swedish Match in return for Dalli overturning the EU ban on snus. Swedish Match recorded this conversation and immediately handed them over to the EU fraud office, OLAF.

Under the guise of acting to "protect the children," the Washington State Governor and legislature are poised to protect cigarette profits at the expense of the public's health.

A new bill, introduced last week in the House, would impose the strictest regulations on e-cigarettes of any state in the country. In addition to banning the sale of e-cigarettes to minors, requiring labeling changes, and requiring child-proof packaging of e-liquids (which are reasonable), the bill would also: (1) ban flavorings - other than tobacco and menthol; (2) ban online e-cigarette sales; and (3) impose a 95% tax on e-cigarettes and all e-cigarette accessories (e.g., batteries); and (4) require the name and address of every purchaser of e-cigarettes to be recorded and saved for five years.

News From The Slope

No, the title isn't a Clarkson reference. I just thought you'd be interested in some of the crackpots that tobacco control industry policies have unleashed recently. Please remember, though, that there is no such thing as a slippery slope.

A wibbling loon writes:We are now faced with concerning population lifestyle trends where countries such as the U.S. see half the population consuming sugar beverages on any given day ... I don't know about you, but I struggle to see how 50% of people drinking one nice-tasting drink - ranging from Coca-Cola through to orange juice - on any given day is a problem. People like nice tasting things, and one drink a day is hardly Armageddon, now is it? I presume the point is to infer that half of the population are guzzling the things from dawn till dusk ... and it's all the fault of those evil capitalists!

Nina Teicholz's Big Fat Surprise

Nina Teicholz's book The Big Fat Surprise received favourable reviews from the Economist and from former BMJ editor Richard Smith so I decided to read it. I wish I hadn't bothered. Teicholz's thesis in a nutshell is that we have been lied to for years about saturated fat, leading Americans to adopt a low-fat, high-carb diet that has made them obese and diabetic and probably given them cancer. She concludes that we should go back to eating lots of red meat and dairy products like people did in the good old days.

I became suspicious of this book almost immediately when the author nonchalantly dismisses America's increasingly sedentary lifestyle as a factor in the rise of obesity between 1970 and the present day, saying:

These eight words in a parenthetical aside is the only reference to physical activity in the book. It is unreferenced and untrue.

Suspecting that Teicholz might not be fully on top of her brief, I searched out a critique online and found a forensic fisking by Seth Yoder at The Science of Nutrition who makes a compelling case for viewing Tiecholz as a hopelessly biased, cherry-picking plagiarist. More of that in a moment, but first let's return to the basic premise that Americans used to eat lots of fat and now they don't.

Teicholz repeatedly claims that "Since the 1970s, we have successfully ... reduced the amount of fat we eat from 43 percent to 33 percent of calories or less." Lord knows where she gets the 43 per cent figure from*, but she compounds the error by claiming that this shows that Americans have reduced their fat consumption by 25 per cent. Neither claim is true.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in the USA between 1970 and 1994, average calorie intake rose in the USA for both men and women (in contrast to the UK) as a result of an increase in carbohydrate intake. As a result, fat as a percentage of total calories fell, from 36.9% to 32.8% for men and from 36.1% to 32.8% for women, but fat consumption fell little, if at all. Indeed, the CDC clearly states: "The decrease in the percentage of kcals from fat during 1971--1991 is attributed to an increase in total kcals consumed; absolute fat intake in grams increased."

As for saturated fat, the CDC notes that between 1970 and 2000, "the percentage of kcals from saturated fat decreased from 13.5% to 10.9% for men and from 13.0% to 11.0% for women." By my calculations, this means that the number of calories men consumed from saturated fat fell from 331 to 285 and the number consumed by women rose from 200 to 206. Hardly a dramatic change but, again, Teicholz refers only to the percentages. She does not mention that the decline for men was tiny, nor that there was no decline at all for women. Nor, indeed, does she mention that the percentage of saturated fat in the American diet is still higher than "less than 10%" recommended in the official recommendations.

In other words, and contrary to Teicholz's endless assertions, Americans have not "dutifully" followed government guidelines, they do not have a low-fat diet and they certainly do not have a "near-vegetarian diet".

The "near-vegetarian diet" claim, which is made more than a dozen times in The Big Fat Surprise, is so patently ludicrous that one wonders why her editor didn't pull her up on it. Here's a chart of the world's biggest meat-eaters. Looking from the top down, it won't take you long to find the USA...

On page 116, Teicholz shows US meat consumption since 1909...

So a "near-vegetarian diet" means eating more meat than nearly any other country and eating more meat than Americans have eaten since records began? Teicholz defends this bizarre claim by saying "about half is poultry" (it's actually more like a third if this graph is correct**) and then berates the US Department of Agriculture for stating, perfectly accurately, that meat consumption is at a "record high". She claims that this is "misleading because they lump together red meat and chicken into one category" (p. 116). Yeah, they do: the category of 'meat'. You know why? Because chicken is meat. But even if you think that chicken is a vegetable, it is still clear that Americans are eating more red meat—which Teicholz claims is "virtually banned" in the USA! (p. 5)—than they did for most of the twentieth century. (Her claim that Native Americans ate "a diet of predominantly meat, mainly from buffalo" is also very dubious.)

Since the premise is untrue, the conclusion she draws from it—that Americans suffer from obesity and diabetes because they've been living off celery and mung beans since the 1970s—must also be untrue. But between the premise and the conclusion we have the, er, meat of the argument which revolves around the evidence for the belief that saturated fat causes heart disease. This is fertile ground for a popular science book, which is why several popular science books have already been written about it, notably Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories which has given Teicholz a great deal of inspiration, to say the least.

Saturated fat is no longer seen as the singular dietary villain that it once was. It seems clear that it raises levels of 'bad cholesterol' which, in turn, increases the risk of heart disease, but the risk may not be as great as was previously believed. The most recent Cochrane Review on the subject concluded:

The findings are suggestive of a small but potentially important reduction in cardiovascular risk on modification of dietary fat, but not reduction of total fat, in longer trials. Lifestyle advice to all those at risk of cardiovascular disease and to lower risk population groups, should continue to include permanent reduction of dietary saturated fat and partial replacement by unsaturates. The ideal type of unsaturated fat is unclear.This is not enough for Teicholz, who wants the reader to believe that saturated fat is not a risk factor for anything and should instead be viewed as a disease prophylactic. To switch from one extreme to the other she has to take some astonishing liberties with the evidence. I'm not sufficiently interested in the topic to check Teicholz's references—no casual reader should have to—and so I would have been deceived time and again had it not been for the fact-checking of the aforementioned Seth Yoder. I recommend you read his two blog posts, even if you are not interested in reading Teicholz's book. It delivers a heavy blow to Teicholz's credibility and her lame response to him suggests that she knows she hasn't a leg to stand on. (She promised a point-by-point rebuttal by mid-March but that has yet to materialise.)

Seth has identified many examples of Teicholz borrowing from other people, but especially from Gary Taubes. She not only uses many of the same sources as Taubes (which is often fair enough), but she tends to take the exact same quotes and makes the exact same mistakes as Taubes does in a way that suggests she hasn't even read some of the original sources. For example...

BFS, page 112:[W]hen Senator McGovern announced his Senate committee’s report, called Dietary Goals, at a press conference in 1977, he expressed a gloomy outlook about where the American diet was heading. “Our diets have changed radically within the past fifty years,” he explained, “with great and often harmful effects on our health.”The problem here is that Teicholz cites the source of this quote as “Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the United States Senate, Dietary Goals for the United States (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1977); 1.” However, this quote does not appear on page 1. It appears on page XIII. Normally I would chalk this up to a simple citation error. The reason I mention it is because Taubes uses the same exact quote on page 10 of GCBC, and also mistakenly cites the source of the quote as being on page 1. I would argue (as I have done previously many times) that this is good evidence that Teicholz is simply lifting sentences from others and simply citing what they cite – likely without ever even seeing the source material.The accusation of plagiarism does not reflect well on Teicholz, but they do not destroy her argument. However, Seth also gives numerous examples of highly selective quotation. For example...

After discussing the Ornish diet for a bit, Teicholz mentions a paper on page 145 that reviews the evidence for (very) low-fat diets:Tufts University nutrition professor Alice Lichtenstein and a colleague reviewed the very low-fat diet for the AHA [

March E-Cigarette Madness: Regional Results for Worst E-Cigarette Lie

Today, I reveal the brackets and the regional finalists for the 2015 Rest of the Story Worst E-Cigarette Lie Championship. Those who have been following the Rest of the Story recently will recognize that there were a huge number of eligible contestants and that the work of the selection committee was difficult. The semifinalists and finalists will be revealed over the coming days. Criteria for selection included: (1) the extent of the misinformation provided to the public about e-cigarettes; and (2) the amount of probable damage to the public's health resulting by the misinformation.

Surely Some Mistake

Yes, we've had a good laugh about this many times before, but once more won't hurt.

Who said this in response to criticism of plain packaging proposals by the ASI?[T]he “domino theory” i.e. that once a measure has been applied to tobacco it will be applied to other products is patently false.Why it was ASH's Deborah Arnott, of course, who is also board member of the Framework Convention Alliance which guides implementation of the WHO's FCTC.

50 words for lobbying

This may come as a surprise, but Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) - the UK's number one state-funded anti-smoking lobby group - is no longer allowed to lobby with the cash it gets from the government.

Ministers have been claiming since 2008 (if not earlier) that ASH's Department of Health grants can't be used for lobbying, but this lie was exposed when ASH's grant application form clearly showed that some of the money was to be used for "media advocacy and lobbying".